Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I felt I ought to pick them up. I crawled around the parquet floor on my hands and knees. I knew there were forty-six pearls; an increasingly tipsy Mrs Boeck had announced this fact often enough at the party earlier that evening. I hunted for all I was worth and when I counted them an hour later, in the middle of the night, I had forty-five. I have always had a suspicion that the missing pearl, that particular pearl, held a secret. Or that it was not a pearl I had lost, but Margrete.

Over the following days she never asked about the pearls. She seemed apathetic. Almost as if she were doped up. The black discs of her pupils put me in mind of a solar eclipse. She complained of headaches. And the nights were different. I would wake to find her lying sobbing. One night she screamed out loud, shook the bed-head like a child. As if she thought I was not there, that I had left her. Gently I got her to lie down again, speaking soothingly to her. Her head looked so small in the big bed, against the white bed linen. It reminded me of the minuscule portrait on the white wall in Uncle Lauritz’s flat. I had had the same thought then as now: love was a massive map on which there was just one big white patch, an undiscovered land — all except for one small face.

I returned the pearls to her one Sunday morning, at breakfast. Everything seemed normal enough — the orange juice which she had squeezed herself, English marmalade and two exquisite flowers in a vase on the table. We were alone. I had had the necklace restrung, with knots between the pearls. And I had bought a new Akoya pearl, identical to the others. Margrete took the necklace and counted the pearls. Or no, she did not count them, she ran them through her fingers as she was saying something to me. She smiled. And then she began to cry. For joy, I thought. ‘This one’s new,’ was all she said, her fingers around one pearl, the third from the loop side of the clasp. The jeweller had shown me where he had put the pearl I had bought. ‘One of the original pearls is gone,’ she said.

She could tell by feel that it was a different pearl. She could see with her hands. She could sense that I had been with another woman in Lisbon. She could run her fingers over me, over my penis and know right away that it was no longer the same. This was an intelligence beyond my ken. Margrete could not only read books, she could read the temperature of the skin, the light in the eyes, the taste of the lips, the body’s secretions.

I confessed. Or rather, I merely said: ‘You’re right, something did happen in Lisbon.’ She put up a hand, a stop sign: ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’ And yet, if she knew, why was it that only after this did I sometimes catch a new look in her eyes. Not jealousy. Her eyes told me that she was hurt. Humiliated. Or forsaken, lonely. That look said she knew she was not loved. That was what destroyed her. She became more and more quiet after that.

Can you kill a person by neglecting to think about them?

Sometimes I can delude myself into believing that I gave up on love back at the point when I abandoned Project X. After all, if I stopped believing it was possible to arrive at a unified whole, then I also stopped believing in love.

Not long after this evening I found a scalpel in our bed. I was making the bed, and there, between the two single mattresses, lay a scalpel, a chillingly sharp surgical instrument, a lethal weapon in the hands of an expert. Like a sword laid between us. When I asked her about it she made light of it, she must have dropped it, was all she said, she used it to cut the pages of the occasional Danish book. I couldn’t help wondering, though. She was a doctor. I felt scared. Slept with my hands under the duvet.

The next few weeks were marked by Margrete’s baffling behaviour: fits of rage, emotional outbursts over the slightest thing, bouts of weeping. She cried so much that she made me feel as if I had thrown sulphuric acid in her face, her features were so altered, the flesh looked ready to slip right off the bones. Then came a period when she simply seemed lost, sad. Engulfed by darkness. Occasionally I would find her sitting dead still in a chair, with unhappiness written all over her. She looked as though she was trying to do a very easy jigsaw puzzle, one with only six or seven big pieces, but could not even manage that much. ‘Buck up,’ I told her one day, quite sharply. If only I had known.

Now and again, when I tried to talk to her, to get through to her, I was reminded of when I was a teenager, hunkered down in front of the radio, fingers delicately searching out the music stations on the medium waveband. Still I did not seriously begin to worry about her until near the end of this phase, which culminated during a Christmas holiday when she seemed apathetic. Blank, I would say. It was clearly all she could do just to exist. She shuffled around her own house as if she did not even know that this was where she lived. I did not realise how bad things were, though, until there were no longer flowers on the breakfast table, no freshly ground coffee, no orange juice which she had squeezed herself. The gold glint in her eyes was gone. I could not help thinking of granite. She seemed hard through and through. Not like stone. She was stone.

Even so, and I am not trying to defend myself here: she did not stay off work and I never saw any sign of Kristin being affected by it.

Could I have done more? I told myself there was nothing I could do. With hindsight I would say I could not be bothered doing anything. And anyway, I had had my alibi well thought-out long before this: I was so busy; I was working day and night on my masterpiece, my big television series.

I could not even say for certain how many months — years? — this thing that I called her ‘problem’ lasted. And then, although I did not actually notice the transition, she was, to all intents and purposes, her old self again, recognisable for that vibrant, reckless beauty. I believed, I wanted to believe, that everything was okay. Things between us were still a little strained, that was all. War cleanses, as Karl Marx said, but when at last she kissed me again, I felt as though there was a pane of glass between our lips. As if I was already in a prison and she was there to see me, in one of those visiting rooms you see in American films.

Most dreadful of all: her virtual absence of sexual appetite and non-existent orgasms moved me, at one point, to accuse her of having taken a lover. Margrete took me to Xi’an in China. It was like a second honeymoon. For some months I hoped that everything was going to be the same as before, including our love life. But then we lapsed back into our old ruts, circles that never touched.

One night I came upon her standing in the dark kitchen with the fridge door wide open, her face lit by the stark light from inside. I thought she must be feeling peckish, looking for something to eat, but she just stood there like that; stood there for five minutes, ten minutes, stood with her face coloured by that white light, in the way too big T-shirt she wore as a nightie, gazing into the fridge. She reminded me of a pearl. Exquisite, but impenetrable to the eye, hiding its nature under layer upon layer of opacity. In the end I had to speak to her. She did not wake up, but turned slowly to face me. Leaned against me. Her face was cold in the hollow of my throat.

I thought I tried. I did ask her now and again. Asked what was wrong. Asked if there was anything I could do. Questions I had been honing for a long time. She did not answer. Or, again: I thought she did not answer. I felt as though we were back in the old situation outside the Golden Elephant, in seventh grade. ‘Idiot,’ she had answered back then. She seemed to be saying the same thing to me now: ‘You’re an idiot,’ she said wordlessly. ‘You’re an ignoramus.’